- Anne Finlay-Stewart, Editor
Ever had one of these?
"Hello, my honest and sincere apologies for invading your privacy. Well I was going through a page When I came across your profile, I was fascinated and interested in knowing you. I tried sending you a friend request but to no avail, hope you don't mind having a new friend? if yes click on my profile and send me a request. Hope to hear from you soon thanks."
Flattering, but...beyond belief that a widower (so sorry for his loss) from New Haven, Connecticut - home of Yale - would need to be searching for new friends among 68 year old married women in Owen Sound, Ontario.
When your actual friends and acquaintences apologize for the redundant "friend requests" on Facebook, saying they have been "hacked", they have actually been replicated. Like my admirer above, their name and a picture have been copied and used to gain as many contacts as possible. Starting with your own Facebook contacts, many of whom may not recall that you are already Facebook friends, they then use your profile, or parts of it, to reach out to others, building their data base with every click someone makes.
(If you think you may have accepted a duplicate friend request, go to the Friends tab on your own page and search the name you think you've accepted. If it appears twice, chances are one of those has little to no content - unfriend that one. While you're in there, you might want to browse for duplicates or people you connected with for some reason long since forgotten. A little pre-spring cleaning.)
I say "they" as if it were a real someone sitting at a computer, but more often than not the computer part was done by a programmer who has created a bot to run all day every day, picking up contacts and putting them in their huge data basket. Those contacts can be sold, used for political and commercial purposes, as well as illegal activity and, contraversially, law enforcement.
We used to be delighted when we received a notification that someone wanted to register on the OwenSoundHub.org website - until we realized that most of the email addresses ended in .RU When we (and thousands like us ) were not buying those, English names with two letter suffixes began to appear - William SmiltGZ or JeremywokLL at Google addresses like petrogradovandrej@gmail. or irinamorozovkova@gmail.
Some of these are just finding more places for their bots to run, others are preparing to be trolls - real people who interact on comment sections and social media, for any number of reasons - some paid, some unpaid, some bored, angry or eager to hear their own voices amplified.
We have seen both bots and trolls on our pages among our 7000-plus followers, and we've watched them torment our colleagues in corporate-owned media, both national and local. They may be people you know, and they may be part of a larger, more co-ordinated movement.We have even recognized them on community pages and groups from a few hundred to a thousand followers, in towns as small as a few hundred in rural Grey-Bruce.
Recognizing, ignoring, deleting, reporting and blocking - in that order - are your best defences against bots and trolls. Those techniques and some deep breathing will likely allow you to enjoy your real live friends and trusted contacts on digital and social media while living in a world of trolls and bots.
